Twitter acquires social media feed condenser Summify

Twitter will likely use the technology to help its users manage the torrent of tweets on their feeds

Twitter has acquired Summify, a startup that summarizes content in people's Google, Facebook and Twitter social media feeds and delivers a daily digest via email, on a website or to a user's iPhone.

"Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it's the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale," Summify said in a blog post.

As a result of the Twitter acquisition, Summify has stopped accepting new account sign-ups and eliminated several features. It will eventually shut down its service completely.

The blog post doesn't say how Twitter plans to integrate Summify into its microblogging service, but the disproportional "noise-to-signal ratio" is a well-known and common problem for Twitter users, who struggle to manage their feeds so that interesting tweets don't get lost among the irrelevant ones.

Thus, it's very likely that Twitter will use the Summify technology to provide functionality that helps users with this issue, perhaps by receiving summary digests of their feeds that focus on valuable content while filtering out the rest.

Juan Carlos Perez covers search, social media, online advertising, e-commerce, web application development, enterprise cloud collaboration suites and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Juan on Twitter at @JuanCPerezIDG.

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